An Analysis of the Optimum Node Density for Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Ad Hoc Networks

This paper investigates simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in the ad hoc network, where access points (APs) with multiple antennas can transfer energy as well as information using a common spectrum resource. The receiving nodes decode the incoming information data (information decoding, ID) and/or harvest the RF energy (energy harvesting, EH), where two different receiving node architectures-time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS)-are considered. By using a stochastic geometry approach, we aim to analyze the transmission capacity and the harvested energy per unit area as performance measures of the SWIPT in the ad hoc network. From the analytical results, we can derive the optimal node densities of ID nodes and EH nodes for TS architectures and, furthermore, optimize the power splitting ratio jointly with the node density for the PS architectures such that the harvested energy per unit area is maximized when the target transmission capacity is given. The proposed node density optimization gives us a useful insight into the design of SWIPT-based ad hoc network, where we can show how densely the APs/nodes can be deployed in a given area and furthermore, find that the ad hoc network with PS receiving nodes outperforms that with TS receiving nodes for a large target transmission capacity, and vice versa.